What's the Best way to Configure CatDV?

We're looking at setting up CatDV as our media asset tool to help get our 100's of TBs of content organized and under control so we can find and leverage our assets without spending tons of time searching.

It seems like it can be really complicated to configure and easy to mess up, so before we go through and configure everything, I was wondering if anyone has any feedback on best practices and lessons learned with regards to setting it up.

For example, when ingesting media, what would you set the folder structure to like to keep things from becoming a mess? Should we use a watch folder and let the MAM ingest and move the media to it's own folder structure, or should we ingest and store into a folder structure with the date or subject matter?

I've also heard recommendations about setting up a controlled vocabulary / keyword list so mis-spellings are minimized and everything is standardized. Which keyworld lists have you used and how has it worked out?

It also seems like making life easier on the person doing the ingesting / logging will help make sure fields get filled out without having 100 required fields. To me, it seems like having a "if you choose yes, then show these metadata choices" style logical hierarchy makes sense. What ways have you found to make things easier and better for ingest?

What are some other pitfalls or things you've learned with your MAM deployment after using it for a while? Is there anything you would do differently if you had to set it up from scratch again?

Hi Will. I don't have any answers yet but my company is in the process of doing something very similar, and ive been thinking about these same questions. I think our VAR will do a lot of the work and I will glean what I can and report back!

We're using the enterprise edition of CatDV Pro along with the Server and Worker apps. Our integrator Sebastion did an excellent job of commissioning the system. He set up the watch actions to automatically fill in metadata fields based on the way the root folder was named. In our case, Producer-Client-Project or Rick-GoldenAcre-LandscapeDesign2016. The watch action was programmed with some extra wizardry (I seem to remember that he used Pearl) so that when an element in the so-named folder was ingested that it would automatically have the Producer, Client and Title metadata fields filled in. I've included an example of the folder tree.
Watchfolders would greatly cut down the tedious process of ingesting existing elements and make the process of ingesting new elements almost fool proof.

Thanks for your comments Lee! We're in the midst of configuring CatDV and we're doing something very similar. Our SAN is currently organized with folders for each Agency we work with, and then subfolders for each Client and again for each Product. We have a watch folder that we're dropping projects into and the Agency, Client, and Product metadata are all automatically filled in based on the folder structure. We literally just turned this on yesterday so I'll update the thread with more details as we move forward.